When Your Kid Is Kind Of Nervous About Next Month: Low-Effort Things You Can Do Today
Last night, I was mid-battle with a stubborn fitted sheet when my 10-year-old Lila leaned in the doorway of the laundry room, twisting the elastic hem of her dinosaur pajamas. “Mom?” she said. “I’m kind of nervous about next month.”
I didn’t look up at first, my brain sorting through all the big events on our calendar for April. The school play. My husband’s new job that starts the first week, which means he’ll be out of town two nights a week. Her little brother’s switch to after-school care, since I’m going back to teaching part-time. “Nervous about the play?” I asked, dropping the sheet on the pile.
“Not just the play,” she said, shifting her weight from one foot to the other. “All of it. Next month. Just everything.”
That’s when I paused. I’ve been there, that vague low-grade nervousness that settles over you when you look ahead at four weeks full of changes, big and small, that don’t feel like they have neat solutions. I used to handle this the wrong way, back when I thought my job as a mom was to make every bad feeling disappear immediately. I’d rattle off all the reasons she shouldn’t be nervous: the play is just for fun, Dad’s new job is a good thing, the after-school care has a trampoline. That’s what I would have done a year ago, and it would have worked about as well as it always does: she’d mumble “yeah I know” and walk away, and the nervousness would still be there, just fizzing under the surface.
This time, I folded the fitted sheet into a lopsided square, sat down on the empty laundry basket next to me, and patted the floor beside her. “Tell me the silliest thing you’re worried about first,” I said.
She blinked, then grinned a little. “That when Dad’s gone, you’ll forget to buy my favorite lime popsicles for after school,” she said. I didn’t laugh it off. I grabbed the dry erase marker off the top of the fridge, walked over, and wrote “LIME POPSICLES – BUY SATURDAY” in big blue letters. Then I walked back. “Okay, what’s next?”
Over the next 15 minutes, she spilled everything. She’s worried she’ll forget her one line in the play and the whole auditorium will stare at her. She’s worried her 7-year-old brother will cry on his first day of after-school care, and it’s her job to stop that. She’s worried Dad will be so tired from driving an hour each way to his new job that he won’t want to play Codenames with us on Sunday nights like he always does. By the end, she’d listed nine things, and none of them sounded as big as that vague “all of next month” worry did when she started.
That’s the thing I’ve learned about this kind of quiet, low-stakes nervousness that kids get about a coming month: it’s not one big problem. It’s a dozen tiny problems all stuck together, so they feel like too much to untangle. Most kids don’t know how to say “I have 10 small worries that add up to a bad feeling about the next month” – they just say they’re kind of nervous about next month.
After we finished listing, we did a simple thing I picked up from a parent meeting at my school: we split the list into two groups. One group is worries we can do something about before next month even starts. The other is worries that can’t be fixed ahead of time, they just need a place to wait.
For the first group, the actions were all tiny, no big plans or expensive outings. We added lime popsicles to the grocery list. We practiced her one line three times while we washed the dinner dishes that night. We drove by the after-school care last Saturday, stayed 10 minutes, let her brother pick out a new dinosaur sticker for his lunch box. My husband blocked 30 minutes every Sunday night in his phone calendar labeled “CODENAMES ONLY” so it doesn’t get taken over by work calls. All of that took less than an hour total, spread out over three days.
For the second group – the worries that can’t be fixed ahead of time, like what if she forgets her line, or what if her brother does cry – we picked a small “worry anchor” that Lila can use whenever that nervous feeling pops up next month. She picked a peppermint from the jar by our front door, and she keeps one in her backpack pocket. If she feels nervous, she just takes it out and sucks on it. It doesn’t fix the problem, but it reminds her that the worry doesn’t have to take over her whole day – she can hold it until she gets home to talk about it. It’s small, it’s silly, but it works for her. Any kid can pick something like this – it can be a sticker on their phone, a knot in their shoelace they can twist, a song they can hum under their breath. It doesn’t have to be fancy.
I used to think I needed to get rid of my kid’s nervousness before the big month starts. Now I know that’s not the point. The point is to take that big vague cloud of worry and split it into small, manageable pieces, so it doesn’t hang over the whole month before it even starts. Lila’s still a little kind of nervous, she told me after we finished. That’s okay. I told her I’m a little kind of nervous too, about getting used to the new schedule and all the changes. It doesn’t mean something bad is going to happen.
Next month starts in three days. We’ve got our popsicles on the list, we’ve got the peppermint in the backpack, we’ve got the Codenames time blocked. Some things will still go wrong, I’m sure. The store might run out of lime popsicles. She might forget her line. Her brother might cry for the first week. But it won’t be one big scary mess of a month anymore. It’ll just be a bunch of small days, and we can handle each one as it comes.
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